Via FOBG Ben Winters, author of (among many other things) Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters:

BG’s alter ego joins a distinguished panel…

Thursday, February 11, 2010
7:30-9:30 p.m.
FREE

Full Spectrum and Greenlight Bookstore
present
THE STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
“Is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?”

A panel discussion with four creators who explore the bittersweet nature of romantic love.

Join us when poet/author/playwright Mo Beasley, musician/singer-songwriter Trevor Exter, author/journalist/advice columnist/BG alter ego Lynn Harris, and musician/composer Tamar-kali discuss the ideas and experiences behind their work, and the prickly thorns that can bloom with desire.  Moderated by musician/transformational counselor K. Neycha Herford.

Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street
[@ South Portland, in Fort Greene]
Brooklyn, NY 11217

C to Lafayette Ave; G to Fulton;
2/3, 4/5, D, Q to Atlantic Ave;
D, M, N, R to Pacific St

About Full Spectrum: Conversations Among Artists, Activists, Explorers & Thinkers

Held at cultural venues throughout New York City, Full Spectrum explores complex social issues through a prism of arts and culture.  Each event features four creators in a one-hour discussion on a topic that links their work, followed by an audience Q&A.  Panelists are drawn from the worlds of dance, fashion, film, literature, music, theater, visual art, and more.  The forums are free to the public, and their impact lasts long after the conversations have ended.

Co-Founders/Co-Producers:
Brian Tate & Danny Simmons
Co-Directors: Lacy Austin, Vanessa Chakour, K. Neycha Herford
Advisors: LaRonda Davis, Malissa/Masala

FS Partners
Our 2010 Season is presented by Con Edison, with generous support from Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, The BRMC Group, Inc., and Bill de Blasio.  Our venue partners are Danny Simmons’ Corridor Gallery, Greenlight Bookstore, and powerHouse Arena.

I have a confession to make. I am a text-holic. And now that I have unlimited  messaging on my iPhone, I have made it my mission to get my money’s worth. I use it to send quick messages to people I don’t really want to talk to. I use it to convey important information when talking on the phone isn’t practical. (i.e. “Movie starts @ 7:15. See u there,” from staff meeting) And I use it to flirt.

Clearly I’m not alone. At least, you know, not in one sense. Text-flirting is sufficiently popular — and landmine-laden — to have spawned not only the unseemly neologism “flirtexting,” but also the book Flirtexting: How to Text Your Way to His Heart and more Web sites than you can shake a rotary phone at.

But of all the tips available — including these new ones from Your Tango — the most important is this: Do not text while under the influence. I have sent out more mortifying texts than I care to remember.

Fortunately, friends don’t let friends text tipsy. My roommate has actually taken to giving me her phone at the start of a girl’s night out with the admonishment, “No matter how hard I beg for this back. DO NOT GIVE IT TO ME!” It’s the same category of bad as drunk dialing, only somehow so much worse as it’s down in the written word, memorialized for all the world to see, and undeniable in the sober light of morning. And likely full of typos.

In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, we read one author’s argument that yes, ’tis better to have loved and lost.

In [the] most provocative and interesting chapters [of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century], Nehring argues for the value of suffering, for the importance of failure. Our idea of a contented married ending is too cozy and tame for her. We yearn for what she calls “strenuously exhibitionistic happiness” — think of family photos on Facebook — but instead we should focus on the fullness and intensity of emotion. She writes of Margaret Fuller: “Fuller’s failures are several times more sumptuous than other folks’ successes. And perhaps that is something we need to admit about failure: It can well be more sumptuous than success. . . . Somewhere in our collective unconscious we know — even now — that to have failed is to have lived.”

Nehring sees in the grandeur of feeling a kind of heroism, even if the relationship doesn’t take conventional form or endure in the conventional way. For Nehring, one senses, true failure is to drift comfortably along in a dull relationship, to spend precious years of life in a marriage that is not exciting or satisfying, to live cautiously, responsibly. Is the strength of feeling redeemed in the blaze of passion even if it does not end happily? she asks. Is contentment too soft and modest a goal? /snip/

“With our cult of success,” Nehring writes, “we have all but obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur.” There is a romanticism here that could look, depending on where you stand, either pure or puerile, either bracing or silly, but it is, either way, an original view, one not generally taken and defended, one most of us could probably use a little more of. Nehring takes on our complaisance, our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important connections, and for that she deserves our admiration.

What do you think ?

Read more:

BG has long maintained that breakups are the messy stuff of life, not the sloppy kiss of death. For one thing, most relationships really do leave us enriched in some way that may outlive the romance: we get to know a new neighborhood, acquire a hobby, finally understand — when our squeeze subjects us to a Buffy marathon conversion process — what all the fuss is about. Why, from one old flame BG learned to snowboard and to change a tire (using a jack, not super-strength); from another, I got art history, and rage. I KID.

But what about those of us lucky (and smart) enough to have swooned for a good cook? (Or, in other news, cooked for a good swoon?) The honeymoon may have ended, but his/her honey-glazed salmon lives on … in your repertoire. Enter (via a friendly tipster) The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: They Came, They Cooked, They Left (But We Ended Up with Some Great Recipes),
which, yes, is a cookbook, but not of the To Serve Man variety. The authors: “‘God,’ we’d find ourselves saying, ‘he made the most incredible vinaigrette….”. It’s a couple of years old, but I’m sure it, and Ezra’s Sticky Chicken, will stand the recipe-test of time.

And while we’re at it, dish: Have any of your relationships, even the less savory ones, yielded delicious results like these?

New Depression dating has had plenty of play in the media this year — dates on a dime, broke and breaking up, yada yada. Here’s the latest: library dates.

Oddly, though, the advice here is to use the library resource for romcoms and sex manuals. But just like you bookworms, I’m thinking the obvious: why not hit the libe ON a date? (Was my alma mater the only college where sex in the stacks was a graduation requirement?)

I’m not advocating public fornication. (No really, I’m not.) But I honestly like the idea of browsing the stacks together, trailing your hands across weathered spines, just talking ’bout books. And, okay, I really like the idea of gleaning a few roleplay ideas from that buttoned-up bookstress seated straight-backed at the desk.

Ah, middle school. The hellish crucible of hormones, homework, and heartache. (It’s not fun like high school, where everyone’s always bursting into song.) So here’s the book I wish I’d had stashed in my locker: Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, The: Middle School (Worst Case Scenario Junior Editions) (co-written by FOBG Ben Winters). Sure coulda used it, say, at eighth-grade “prom,” when my zipper broke up with my dress shortly before my “date” broke up with me.

What about you? Any real-life middle school worst-case scenarios you care to share?

For some, music is the food of love. For BG, food is the food of love. Which is why she knows she’ll dig FOBG Giulia Melucci’s I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti.

From today’s NY Times: “Her romantic adventures are interspersed with recipes like “Morning After Pumpkin Bread” and “Ineffectual Eggplant Parmigiana” (“Serves the two of you plus the three people you wish were there to keep the conversation going”).

“At 22, Leslie Morgan Steiner seemed to have it all, a Harvard diploma, a glamorous job and apartment in NYC, and a handsome boyfriend. But this golden girl was hiding a dark secret. She’d made a mistake shared by millions, she fell in love with the wrong person…”

Watch the video trailer for Crazy Love here.

You’ve finished War and Peace, The Guns of August, and the complete works of your Facebook news feed. Now take up this trashtastic double-dog Dollanganger dare: Read — re-read — the entire V.C. Andrews oeuvre (or at least one per month), including but not limited to My Sweet Audrina.

Moral of the story: your love life can’t possibly be as bad as Cathy’s.